about volatile.d.o/n
Hi all,
we had some discussion about volatile, and I'm more and more considering to
pick this task up. I think some issues are quite obvious:
- packages should only go in in cooperation with the maintainers;
- volatile is not "just another place" for backports, but should only
contain changes to stable programs that are necessary to keep them
functional;
- Good candidates are clamav (including spin-offs), spamassassin,
chkrootkit;
- It should allow any administrator to "just use" volatile, as they "just
use" security.d.o, and they should be confident that nothing is broken by
that;
- for bugs, the normal debian bug tracking system should be used.
Some things are not so obvious:
- security support: There should be security support for volatile. However,
security.d.o is probably not the right place for that, and adding another
task to the security-team is IMHO also not the way to go. So, this needs
to be placed on the burden of the volatile team.
- "releases" of volatile: One could consider to seperate volatile into a
release and a staging area. An advantage would be that system
administrators would only need to update on some times. However, if we
restrict volatile, only upload required changes and don't have more than
10 packages in it, we don't need that.
- adding volatile packages to point releases: Though it may be seen as good
idea to add volatile packages at the next point release, this is
currently a no-go. I can see the good reasons for that, and I accept
them.
Two technical questions remain open for now, and needs to be solved
independend of the policy questions above.
- ftp-server: Should volatile be a "normal" part of the debian ftp-server,
or be setup independently (like e.g. security.d.o is)? Normal part would
of course be nicer for our users (and especially mirroring is free), but
requires some more work initially. However, this decision is in the
domain of the ftp-masters.
- architectures/buildd support (partly connected with ftp-server): Which
architectures should be supported? Perhaps starting with a smaller number
is a good idea, and adding more if they can cope with the updates.
I added http://volatile.debian.net/ to be a placeholder for the current
discussions.
Also, there is a archive present on
http://volatile.debian.net/debian-volatile, so if maintainers want to start
adding packages, they may contact me.
That's all for now. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Cheers,
Andi
--
http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/
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